Category Archives: Electronic Entertainment

Electronic Entertainment, Features of Failure

This is a nice long list of the many failures of Fallout 76

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Today we cover a great deal many of the hilarious failures of Bethesda Game Studios’ absolutely terrible Fallout 76.

First among it’s many sins, is the fact that is a “Games as a Service” concept, a online multiplayer game that drip feeds content in order to keep players buying severely useless micro-transactions junk in an online store bolted on the game, like some horribly cancerous malignant growth.

A significant chunk of the assets are recycled from Fallout 4, using the same engine, and engine that could be very reasonable described as “hideously outdated” or more accurately as “pre-historic”, except that parts that were reused from Skyrim, the Scorchbeast of Fallout 76 uses the same code as the dragons from Skyrim, including the famous “the dragon is flying backwards” bug.

This game was released as a full price 60 US$, even through it’s just a half-baked multiplayer mod for Fallout 4, mind you, the price started cratering like you wouldn’t believe within days of launch, there was a 12% sale after SIX days on Green Man Gaming, hell, 22 days after the release, you could get Fallout 76 for 40 US$, if that isn’t an indicator for failure, then fuck off you muppet.

BEHOLD!

So many bugs, many of the bugs would be patched out and then somehow back in, for reasons that are explained by the chosen engine: “Creation Engine”, that was shat out from the Gamebryo engine about seven years ago, The Gamebryo engine died back in 2015 by the way and nobody cares about it, the Creation Engine is a freakshow that really doesn’t work anymore.

And then there was the Collector’s Edition, now as a sensible person, I find most Collector’s Editions tremendously silly and very much stupid, so frankly, it was fitting for the idiots to get punished for their total lack of self-control, but on the other hand, customer rights.

This is what the Collector’s Edition looked like, note the bag.

The Edition came with the usual dumb shit nobody sane ought to ever care about and that Canvas bag up in the corner, I don’t mind that one at all, at least it’s a bag, it can always be used as a bag.

This is what the bag actually looked like, lovely canvas eh?

Holy shit, did the fans who bought this massive failure of a game go absoluetly apeshit and with good reasons, this kind of deceptive practices are banned in most civilized countries and even the US, so Bethesda went on DAMAGE Control! Offering no less than FIVE HUNDRED Super-Premium-Cash-Shop-Microtransactions Atoms, which is around five bucks, of imaginary money, for a digital artifact, that doesn’t cost them anything, an ironically wasn’t enough to actually buy the in-game canvas bag, a part of the postman set, cost 550 Atoms, the irony.

This was for the INFLUENCERS! Didn’t do much though.

And of course, the precious Influencers got their little special bag, because we all need more reasons to hate them with a burning passion.

Oh yeah, they did manage to get proper bags out in the end.

In the end, Bethesda finally gave up and actually shipped out bags made of canvas, even after they claimed that sourcing CANVAS was very difficult.

Then on the 23rd of April this very year, they went all out Pay2Win on our arses, releasing “Basic Repair Kits”, that you can only buy for REAL money in the Atom Shop (No, the tiny amounts of free Atom Premium currency you get isn’t enough for anything sane, it’s just used to encourage you to spend, you feeble-minded troglodyte), sure, a drop of “Improved Repair Kits” could fall out of the Random Number Generator, but the odds are stacked against you.

Then the start of September, they released two little extra things on the Atom Shop, a bunch of robots that automatically scavenge the local area for you, giving you a massive advantage in that you can concentrate on other activities rather than scavenging for parts, pretty big in a game about Survival, and a Refrigerator that reduce spoilage of you food with 50%, essentially reducing gathering/hunting for food with, guess what, 50%, again, big advantage in a sodding survival game.

And then on the 25th of September 2019, the T-51b Power Armor collectible helmets, that you can buy in shops if you’re an idiot, are now being recalled, I also wonder why a “collectible” that has a production number of 20.000 can really be called a “collectible”, but no matter, some of the fabric inserts apparently “may” contain mold, well done.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/09/24/20000-fallout-76-power-armour-helmets-are-being-recalled-due-to-health-risk/
Sourced!

And just as a final word on this dismal failure.

Yup, Fallout 76 have pretty much sold bugger all, compared all of the never Fallout games.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/504477/global-all-time-unit-sales-fallout-games/
Electronic Entertainment, Features of Failure

Yogventures is today’s failure

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It’s Wednesday boys, girls, toasters, assault helicopters and other, time for another failed crowdfunded nonsense product and/or service. And today’s utter failure is Yogventure, a masterstroke of failure, as it never actually released into anything resembling the promised product.

I ought to know, I funded the stupid kickstarter and I regret it to this day.

The concept originated from a Youtube group know as the Yogscast, who made their fame from a series of Minecraft adventures, mostly scripted with various storylines about wizard and cookies and what not, high production values, decent fun for the time.

The idea behind Yogventure was essentially a Minecraft clone, with a heavy focus on multiplayer and modding, i.e. creating maps and gameplay elements tailormade for whatever purposes your specific players needed.

They managed to get over half a million US dollars out of it, with 13,647 backers essentially preordering the game, they even had a prototype to show off.

Let’s list the promises:

  • Just like Minecraft
  • Not blocks though
  • Multiplayer-focus
  • Has characters from our Award-winning YouTube series.
  • Crafting
  • Easy to mod

There we go. Fortunately, there are no real stretch-goals, thank fuck for that at least.

So, what happened? Well, they outsourced the entire development to some other studio, rather than making it themselves, which turned out to be brave. As in the whole thing just vanished into bankruptcy and wasted money.

Apparently the developer they’d basically outsourced the actual work to, hired an artist to do assets, without a contractual obligation to actual do it and paid the artist in advance? Which sounds utterly bonkers to me, you’d have to be completely fucking stupid to anything like that.

Although there’s been at least seven other kickstarters that have failed due to contractual shenanigans, so perhaps it wasn’t that odd.

The single potentially fraudulent thing the Yogscast crew really did, was that to claim that they had a prototype during the kickstarter, turns out if was a Unity engine hackjob put together just for the crowdfunding campaign, probably not fraud, definitely unethical as fuck.

The lesson? Don’t trust anyone.

Electronic Entertainment, Games

Apex Legends Developers are today’s failure

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Holy shit, now that’s a meltdown

Now, for those who wonder what Apex Legends is, it is a so called “Battle Royale” video game, basically just a big open map with a whole bunch of player, either solo or in teams, with the objective being delightfully simple.

Last player/team standing, everyone else must die, there’s various mechanics to ensure the whole game doesn’t end up with one player hiding in a corner, there’s a slowly decreasing play area, anyone caught outside get’s melted by video game magic or lasers or what have you.

Ever since Player Unknown’s Battleground (PUBG) released a buggy game, this has been the big thing the AAA publishers have been trying to get into, with various degrees of failure, Epic’s Fortnite is the present number one on the market, but everyone’s trying this. It’s MOBAs and MMOs all over again.

Now EA had Respawn Entertainment slam Apex Legends together to make a quick buck using existing assets from Titanfall 2, using existing assets to make games isn’t by any means a bad idea, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was assembled out of re-skinned assets from Far Cry 3, so if you need something fast, this was the correct way to do it.

Nobody planned for Apex Legends to make gargantuan amounts of cash, just a nice little share of the market, however, with people being fatigued from playing PUBG or unwilling to handle the art style and player-base of Fortnite, Apex Legends was a solid contender with decent enough gameplay.

Until this happened:

And the reddit didn’t behave properly, not the usual echo chamber, when we are all with amazing alacrity, shown just what the business strategy is for Apex Legends monetization: Massive Whaling.

Whales being a video game term for big spenders, the gambling equivalent of a high roller, gamers who lack the self-control and spent small and sometimes LARGE fortunes on silly digital items and such nonsense.

Well, nice to see what they think about everyone, except the whales of course

Yeah, this isn’t the best way to communicate with your audience, on the other hand, it’s honest, the fucking hate everyone who doesn’t burn though 100+ US$ for a silly video game.

Wow, what the fuck?
There’s a whole bunch of these.

So? Why is all this going on? Simple, Apex Legends made about 150 million US$ in revenue for EA in their most recent quarter, that’s about 10% of the company’s total revenue, from one source, that definitely wasn’t planned to be this massively successful.

So what happened? Well, EA now have an interest in really getting the revenue up as far as possible, squeezing every single penny and cent out of the players as the possibly can, which is what they always do.

But not only that, when Respawn was bought by EA back in 2017, EA paid 151 million US$ in cash, that isn’t the noteworthy part, the second part of the price is: ” Up to $164 million in long-term equity in the form of restricted stock units for Respawn”

Obviously, we don’t have a clue how this equity would work, we have no clue what the restrictions are, however, what I can tell you with absolutely certainty: The Leadership of Respawn Entertainment has a really big stake in the company’s profitability, for it’s a fairly safe assumption, to presume that a significant element of the restrictions are based on earnings.

So of course the developer goes nuts, why wouldn’t he/she/it/they? That person might have a lot of money at stake, a lot of stress, a lot of greed.

Not it matters, nothing will come of this, everyone will forget it within a week or two.

And that is today’s failure.

Electronic Entertainment, Features of Failure

The Ouya is Today’s Failure

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The Ouya is Today’s Failure, because every Wednesday is going to be failed crowdfunding projects, because otherwise we’d never learn anything.

The Ouya was a micro-console, I say was, you can’t get the misbegotten thing anymore, for which all of humanity ought to be immeasurably grateful, it was a silly thing. Annouced in 2012 as a “revolutionary” home video console by Julie Uhrman, described as an industry veteran by many, she wasn’t an industry veteran when we’re talking about a console, she would be one talking pure business development, but that didn’t translate over.

HELLO! MY NAME IS JULIE UHRMAN! I AM VERY PASSIONATE ABOUT THINGS!

They used kickstarter and did get over eight and half million US dollars, not bad for the former Vice President of Digital Distribution of IGN (Note, IGN doesn’t actually do proper digital distribution, IGN is a website for basically paid reviews), at the time the fifth largest sum kickstarted, even on that platform it has been eclipsed, all the way down to nine, including all platforms Ouya isn’t even close to the 200 million US$ and more StarCitizen has raised.

Still, not to shabby, combined it with various venture capital, they actually managed to release the product, that’s right, for my fellow engineers out there, they released a “Minimum Viable Product”.

Fucking hell, this was massively popular? Why?

It was a smartphone in a box, literally, the blasted thing used Andriod and had an Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset to handle the lifting, wont call it heavy, it can run mobile apps, that isn’t heavy lifting even at the worst of times.

And guess what, the design of the ugly little shitbox? YVES BEHAR, the primogenitor of the damned himself returns to sprinkle failure all over the venture, the Ouya had issues with overheating and STANDING UP, mostly due to issues with the case.

The controller? The buttons would get stuck all the time, the touch pad in the center, designed to handle mobile games touch controls, didn’t work properly in the earlier versions and it felt cheap. Then again, what did people expect from a device costing 99 US$.

HATE
Hate.

April 2013 they began delivering the pre-ordered Ouyas, June it was put up for sale, October they announced a redesign in 2014, it went up in the end of January 2014, double the storage and a new controller, hot damn.

Now, as with virtually all consoles released since like 1995, Ouya didn’t make any money on the consoles, nobody does, except Sony on the first PlayStation but they basically made the whole thing in-house from whatever random crap they had around, the money comes from licensing and software sales.

But the Ouya was terminally stupid, you could replace the entire thing with a HDMI cable and a laptop, then add in various casting devices and the Raspberry Pi being better in almost every way.

In 2015, Alibaba for some forsaken reason, throw ten million dollars at the sinking ship, guess what? The whole mess was sold to Razer in July of the same year, frankly, Alibaba probably didn’t even notice the cash was gone.

Razer only purchased the software and developer relations elements, the rest was left to rot in the sun, they used this technical staff to support their own micro-console and what do you know, it was discontinued in 2016.

And how does this sordid tale end? Total shutdown of everything in June this very year, rendering a default Ouya an even more useless hunk of junk.

Julie Uhrman now works as Head of Media, for Playboy.

The lessons learned are that micro-consoles are silly.

Sources:

https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/playboy-julie-uhrman-president-media-1202936333/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya

The OUYA: Bullshit marketing and idiots

https://www.linkedin.com/in/julieuhrman/

Electronic Entertainment, Games

Hitman’s Elusive Targets are absolutely abhorent

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So, that Hitman game that came out some time ago, it had these little special extra event things, Elusive Targets, adding a new target onto pre-existing maps, giving you another target in a map you’d already be familiar with.

Not a bad idea eh? Now here’s were the alarms should go off, there are also secondary targets on most of the maps in the game, a movie set in an ancient Italian town, murder the star, that kinda stuff, work pretty much like the normal mission on the map, just with slightly different motives.

There are also little extra targets on the maps, adding randomized utterly retarded requirements on the higher levels, like requiring you to carry a gun openly, causing panic all around, great fun.

And by fun, I dentistry school levels of horror.

So, what’s so special about the Elusive Targets? They are single-try, time-limited and one-time events.

What? One-time, time-limited events? Like what Guild Wars 2 did in the early years? The biggest complaint about that game? So big they abandoned it in the second season of the story line? Yes, that’s right dark voices in my head, that’s precisely what it was.

As for the single-try thing, I don’t know, last time I checked, the beacon of “HARDCORE GAMEPLAY” Dark Souls still let you try again and again and again and again and you get the point, but not the Elusive Target in Hitman, they are “special”.

The same way President Trumps tiny hands are “special”.

Now, some progress was made recently, IO Interactive bought the Hitman EVERYTHING back from SquareEnix, the horrible publisher who really just survive off the Final Fantasy games and mindless fans, releasing them from a fate, similar to that of every studio ever owned by EA.

And they decided to allow the Elusive Targets to come back again, so not One-Time events anymore, that’s a GOOD thing, it’s a single player game son, I expect to have the opportunity to try ALL the content, as many fucking times as I damn well please, as a citizen of a Free and Equal country!

Sadly, the two other limitations are still there:

Fuck me sideways
Hitman really is pretty stupid

Yup, I just powered up the game, started the Elusive Event, didn’t read the pop-up completely, died horribly and WAS LOCKED OUT FROM TRYING AGAIN! The hell? Why? Why are you preventing me from playing the game the way I sodding want to? You learn from failure, the only thing I learned from that, was to use a Walk through all the time. Utterly pointless.

Also, someone who failed the first time this event came around, can’t try again.

Because Elusive Targets are “special”.

What a bag of cunts.

Fix this idiocy IO Interactive, give us access to the content we have paid for, even Dark Souls 2 doesn’t prevent me from endless trying to die my way through a barrier, hell, they encourage me to do so.

Electronic Entertainment, Star Citizen

Star Citizens and Transparency

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One of the biggest complaints of Star Citizens, is the total lack of transparancy, as a backer, I have no clue, not even a single clue at all, about what Cloud Imperium Games have been spending money on.

All am hearing is something about mocap studioes, bizare really, who the hell still uses FMVs in Video Games? Other than EA Los Angeles for Command and Conquer, and that’s only because it’s tradition. It’s in-engine cutscenes these days lads, much cooler to watch, no loading screens either.

For all we know, Star Citizens burned 100 million US$ on Motion Capture equipment, a CryEngine license and big celebrities for some shitty storyline.

That’s it, that’s all we know, other than the laughable “Alpha”, which CIG now problaim is a “substantial” chunch of the promised game, despite the Alpha being limited to 16 people per server, has issues with the frames per second when someone shots at something in the other corner of the solar system and doesn’t have functional aiming.

That’s right, using CryEngine, an engine literally build for First Person Shooting, CIG has somehow managed to break the aim of the guns.

Impressive isn’t it? And due to the total lack of transparency, we have no idea what’s going on, why they relocate studioes, why is Sandi Gardiner, a failed Z-list actress even remotely involved with any of this?

Compared to Frontier, a publically traded company, where we can all just go to the “investor” section, and download a copy of their Financial report, and tada, all the transparency you could ever want.

I can’t imagine this kind of nonsense can carry on for much longer, and not just for StarCitizens, for Kickstarter and Crowd-funding in general.

At some point, some large-scale Crowdfuncing fails completely, and the politicians in Europe notices, and EU politcs have a tendency to be less “Sucking the teat of Wall Street” and more “Wait, we’re fucking Socialists/Populists, FUCK YOU, we need to get reelected”, so Consumer Rights will punch through at some point.

All we need is the failure.

Electronic Entertainment, Games, Star Citizen

Star Citizens and refunds.

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Cloud Imperium Games (Cloud Imperium Games)

Dec 20, 14:32

Hi there,

Thank you very much for your patience with this ticket.

We have reviewed your account status and regret that we are not able to accommodate your request for a refund since it was received outside of the statutory 14 day period.

Your pledge was made as part of the crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for the development of “Star Citizen.” As such you were aware that the funds would be actively applied after receipt for this purpose, not idly maintained in a bank account, and therefore could not be subject to a refund once used. As you may know from the extensive information on our website Robertsspaceindustries.com, Cloud Imperium Games has been working diligently over the past 3 years on the development of the game, and now employs over 260 staff in four studios. 2,538 reports, updates and web shows have been made available during this time, and first modules with limited gameplay were offered as early as in fall of 2013 – by now hundreds of thousands of gameplay hours have been played on our servers. The development of the game is proceeding steadily, and a substantial part of the promised game offering dozens of gameplay hours has been made available to the backers in early release versions (see further detail below).

Pursuant to the terms of your agreement (see Sec. 4 of the Commercial Terms, and Sec. IV.A of the subsequent Terms of Service, as applicable, https://robertsspaceindustries.com/tos), your payment was a deposit to be used for the “Game Cost” (as defined therein), and such deposit has since been “earned by CIG and become non-refundable to the extent that it is used for the Game Cost…” You further agreed to “irrevocably waive any claim for refund of any deposit amount that has been used for the Game Cost and Pledge Item Cost in accordance with the above.” The only exception would be a return of unearned funds remaining in case of an abandonment of the project. If you pledged on Kickstarter, you agreed to these terms when you transferred your pledge account to robertsspaceindustries.com.

These terms are consistent with the specific nature of crowdfunding and the foreseeable use of your pledge – we hope you appreciate that we cannot ask our hard working personnel to return some of their salary nor that it would be appropriate to use current backers’ funds provided for game development as a refund for an earlier and committed pledge.

While a substantive part of the promised gameplay is now available, we acknowledge that delivery of some game elements has been delayed due to expansion of Star Citizen’s scope. This expansion is a result of the community’s declared desire to have the initial release version of the game developed to a much greater depth than contemplated originally upon start of the campaign. It is inherent to the nature of crowdfunding that such an adjustment to the project may occur. Ultimately, this will benefit all backers including yourself, since every backer will be receiving a much greater value for his/her pledge, but it may – as in this case – cause an extension of the delivery dates.

We acknowledge that some individual backers may find the additional wait undesirable. However, as per Sec. VII of the ToS, you did “acknowledge and agree that delivery as of such date is not a promise by RSI since unforeseen events may extend the development and/or production time.”

We’d like to point you to the significant gameplay which is now available; https://robertsspaceindustries.com/feature-list and if you haven’t already, we encourage you to download the installer from this url: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/download and patch up to play the latest version of the game.

Star Citizen is a project for gamers, by gamers. Delays and changes are always unfortunate, but in our case they are also one of the reasons the project is so special. By financing the project using crowd funding, our team is not beholden to a publisher who would insist we ship a game unfinished or broken to meet a particular date. Thanks to continued backing of our community, we have the needed creative freedom over the project, to create a unique game, and we feel the results, such as unparalleled immersion and fidelity, are already speaking for themselves!

We sincerely hope you enjoy the updates both current and future in the Star Citizen ‘Verse.

Thank you.
RSI Customer Service Management

I was wondering when I’d get the copy-paste e-mail, took a fair amount of time to be sure.

Electronic Entertainment, Games, Star Citizen

Star Citizen and you

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Star Citizen, another result of nostalgia, together with that abomination Godus that Peter Molyneux vomited forth upon an unsuspecting world.

Now, I have no clue what the hell Wing Commander is, no earthly clue at all, I didn’t have a PC that could actually run anything as fun as video games back in those days.

The damn graphics card had at best sixteen colours, not entirely sure. It has been many a dark and horrible year since.

Now, do you remember the Ouya, that useless little shit box only the mentally deranged could love? Of course you don’t, it was shut down and its intangible assets were devoured by Razor, who wants to make a go at a mini-console themselves.

The Ouya was a kickstarter success, however, as it managed to rake in millions, promising a “revolution” and that it would “save the games”.

“Beware those who promises revolution, because in their hearts, the seek themselves your exploiter.”

Ouya was a miserable failure, it was released, but the end product was such a pile of garbage, not even Notch wanted to touch it, and that crazy Swede sure does want to touch it all.

Now, another contender is reach peak failure cascade, Star Citizen, the largest crowdfunding success in history, one hundred million US dollars, for a video game, designed and managed by a man, who had massive success with video games.

The last of those, from 1997, to bad it’s 2005, and also to bad that Origin Systems was the company who actually made the damn games, Chris Roberts was the designer, but one man does not make games like that, a company does.
Unless that one man is a complete lunatic genius, which Chris Roberts isn’t.

In between the last Wing Commander, Chris Roberts was the designed on Freelancer, which I actually own, and consider an excellent game, because I picked it up years after it was released, randomly, at some bargin bin, published for reasons unknown by Ubisoft, I think, possible Infogrames, who cares?

I dodged all the hype however, and that’s the important bit, without the hype, the promises and all that insanity, Freelancer’s a pretty good game, definitely a classic, but nothing else.

The storyline was a decent little space opera, nothing spectacular, and it was fun exploring all the cool little corners of the game.

So, what did Roberts do in between? He produced movies, as a producer. Good movies? Not really, Lord of War is pretty awesome, the rest are just ever so much meh.

But he caught the smell of the nostalgia trip we’ve seen in the last few years, ever since the success of Tim Schaefers “LET ME MAKE AN ADVENTURE GAME” campaign.

But Nostalgia is a siren song, just because nostalgia tells you something was cool, doesn’t mean it was, Command & Conquer Red Alert was cool, OpenRA isn’t that much fun to play, is it technically the same game? Yes, yes it is, the same game. Nostalgia just ain’t enough to generate a fun experience.

So, Star Citizen, 100 million US dollars, generated based on Nostalgia, with a man at the helm, who has squandered resources before, when he over-promised Freelancer.

So what is the problem with Star Citizen? Many:

1. Lack of transparency, compared to the only other meaningful point of comparison, Frontier Developments (Elite Dangerous), we know what Frontier spend their money on, who went on inside the company, the whole thing, because Frontier is a publicly traded company, and Cloud Imperium is a personal fiefdom of silence and obscurity.
2. Feature Creep, Chris Roberts recently promised the Star Citizen would contain birds.
3. Cult-like community, you know how bad League of Legends community is? Yeah, Star Citizen’s is waaay worse.
4. Sandi Gardiner.
5. General incompetence, to the point that they can’t do a live-stream properly.
6. Terms of Service fuckery, let’s change the TOS several times! That won’t backfire at all, yayz.
7. The sale of in-game assets to fund development.
8. Broken promises, a lot of broken promises.

So, join me over the next few days, as I go through each point, and mercilessly mock authority!

CHRISROBERTS

Culture, Electronic Entertainment

Today, I’ll write about art

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Amber Coal is obviously a complete lunatic, sadly, that’s absolutely nothing special at all. With the Internet being a giant echo chamber of idiocy, lunatics and maniacs have an awesome time on it. I mean, who’s going to notice yet another mad hatter in an ocean of silly hats.

It’s neither unusual or peculiar.

And doesn’t actually matter, Lunatics often produced some brilliant stuff, the border between genius and madness is pretty often shattered, so no worries!

Let’s just barrel into whatever games Amber has managed to vomit forth upon us all.

IwhatA Game of Cat and Mouse for example, isn’t a game, but is absolutely performance art, interactive performance art, but not a game, it sadly lacks an active objective for the player to actually do, it’s message about entropy isn’t really anything spectacular, if I needed a remind about the terminal heat death of the universe, I’d go watch Nicki Minaj videos.

And burn out my own optical nerves, just to manage the pain you see.

Still, should probably try another one of the creatures deranged games:

UFOHNO, yeah.

UFONO

Yes, we get it, you’re trying to tell us something. But the message “Not everything is what you see” is so old, that I’ve encountered them reading my way through roman graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, it’s old news sweetie, you’re not suprising anyone.

So what if I use a mind control ray to force owls to land on the ground, and then be devoured by violently agreesive rabbits?

Well done, I get the message, it’s all about control and doing crazy shit, well done, now go play Bioshock instead, it tells pretty much the same message, just wrapped in a really good game.

Or play Spec Ops: The Line, which messes around with halucinations to get the same effect, while also being incredibly good.

Or I could look at shitty pixel games with simple messages, choices, choices, so many choices.

Fortunately, they belong to me, not to you.

Electronic Entertainment, Games

Maxis has died a disgraceful death.

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Maxis is dead.

The old developer behind the SimCity franchise, Spore and the Sims, is no more. It has ceased to be. It has gone and joined Westwood and Bullfrog in Light entertainment heaven.

But, before you let the floods of tears overwhelm your own sanity, to remember just one thing.

Maxis died years ago, all that we wave goodbye to today, was a shallow sad little shell, all the talent and wonder that produced the great games of yesterday, have long gone away.

Will Wirght, creator of Simcity, Simcity 2000, Simcity 3000 and Spore, have gone of to do fuck knows what, nothing game related at least.

The last thing released by Maxis, was Simcity 4, one of the best Citybuilders EVER released, after that, all that Maxis have done is more versions of the Sims, esssentially copying itself every two years or so.

And most of the Sims’s activities was tranfered into another studio entirely years ago, as for Simcity 2013?

Wasn’t made by Maxis, it was made by EA, and their diabolical marketing and financial department. Nothing about Simcity 2013 is worth anything.

So worry not my brothers, Maxis died years ago, today, we simply dump the rotting corpse into a shallow grave, where it should have been dumped years ago.

Luck Cities Skylines looks good, eh?